T I M E M A N A G E M E N T
I’m talking serious sick here, not the borderline sore throat and
headache that might keep you in bed on a Saturday but not on a
workday. In a way, the serious sickness is easier, because you don’t
have to decide whether or not to attempt to go to work, and you
don’t have to feel guilty about staying in bed while the rest of the
world is tending to business. (Depending on your tolerance for
pain and your level of guilt, you might have to be near death to
achieve this state.)
Let’s suppose you’re sick enough to have to stay flat on your
back in bed for two days, and you can barely wobble around the
house in bathrobe and slippers on the third. In all, you miss an
entire week of work.
Meanwhile, what happened to the stuff on your to-do list?
The meetings went on without you. Folks figured out they
could live without the quarterly report for another week. You’ve
got 138 messages on voice mail (sixty-two of them from the same
person), 178 e-mails (fifty-two of them copies of replies and replies
to replies by multiple recipients on a single question), and a desk
awash in memos, faxes, mail, and other unnatural disasters. You
take stuff home for a week, trying to get caught up.
That’s bad, but it isn’t that bad. You didn’t die. You didn’t lose a
loved one. Western civilization did not grind to a halt. Commerce
and government managed to struggle on without you.
It’s too late to respond to some of those urgent e-mails and
messages, but it turns out they really didn’t need a response after
all.
Try to remember that the next time you’re relatively healthy but
nevertheless falling behind on the day’s tasks.
Think you’ve had a bad day at the office? Consider former Los
Angeles Dodger center fielder Willie Davis, who met his own per-
sonal disaster during the second game of the 1965 World Series
against the Baltimore Orioles. In the top of the fifth inning of
a 0–0 tie, with Dodger ace Sandy Koufax on the mound, Davis
managed to make three errors in one inning, including two on the